


Froodian Slip

by executrix



Category: Firefly, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-28
Updated: 2011-09-28
Packaged: 2017-10-24 02:53:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/258109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Simon’s life is very complicated right now, and he wishes the guy would stop asking him to borrow his towel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Froodian Slip

**Author's Note:**

  * For [st_aurafina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/st_aurafina/gifts).
  * In response to a prompt by [st_aurafina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/st_aurafina/pseuds/st_aurafina) in the [multiverse_2011](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/multiverse_2011) collection. 



1  
Space is big. Really big. On the other hand, Serenity wasn’t particularly big, and Simon’s room in the passenger dorm even less so.

So, when a noise woke him, he snapped on the bedside lamp with one hand, and reached under the mattress for the gun with the other. Simon was a quick study. You don’t get to the Top Three Percent in a prominent medacad by being slow on the uptake.

He really, really, couldn’t miss at that range, and he didn’t.

2  
This would be a very, prodigiously, short story—a minuscule story--you may think that a drabble is over quickly but it would be an epic compared to this. Except that the gun was Jayne’s least favorite one. Simon won it in what he accurately predicted would be the last Tall Card game when he could get away with an upward cornflower gaze through long eyelashes and innocent queries about how the rules went, *exactly,* so he made it count.

Simon was in point of fact a very good Tall Card player, even on the level. When playing by normal civilized rules he dealt from the top of the deck. With his metaphorical back to the wall, or the shoji screen, though, he could deal from any part of the deck.

And the gun was Jayne’s least favorite one because it didn’t fire bullets, it fired tranq cartridges, which he really didn’t see the point of and only bought after brunch on a blazing afternoon on OmicronPi after too many PanGalactic GargleBlasters. He was too hungover to shoot anybody in the immediate peri-purchase period, and never found out until much later. Imagine his surprise.

3\.   
“What’s your name?” the kindly older gentleman asked.

“Capissen-38,” said Ford, who was *not* a particularly quick study. Which probably explained why, after all those years, nay, centuries, he was still a freelance journo. He tried to move, but he was stuck to the chair with some sort of sticky tape. There was something else underneath which he couldn’t quite see. The flash of white buoyed his hopes beyond what he could dare to surmise.

“And who are you, son?”

“I’m a roving editor, for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Ford said proudly.

The kindly older gentleman turned to a clean-cut younger man next to him. “Never heard of it. How about you?”

The man in the white shirt and emerald brocade waistcoat opened a pocket Encyclopedia, scrolled around with the stylus for a little while, then shook his head. “Well, it only holds a million documents,” he apologized, then wondered why *he* was apologizing to someone who had burglarized his way into his room and was now parceled up like Aunt Melinda’s oatmeal-raisin rocks being sent Economy Rate from Lilac to Deadwood.

“What I really want to know is how you got here, anyway,” Mal said, for let us eschew this persiflage.

“I was trying to hitch a ride on a flying saucer, but this was the best I could do,” Ford said. “Also, I knew you’re going to want to hear what I have to say, so I just dialed you up on my electronic sub-etha signaling device.”

“You really expect me to believe that?” Mal said. “Kinda implausible, wouldn’t you say?”

“But not **infinitely** ,” Ford said. “Got any Dentrassi cooks, by the way?”

Mal gave him a puzzled look. “Meant to hire a cook, live like folks, never panned out though. But you were sayin’?”

“Look, cut to the chase, it’s Parliament,” Ford said. “They’ve got this plan, and it’s going to start with Miranda. They’re going to make it a good and happy place. It’s going to work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.”

“My uncle Jabe moved to Miranda,” Kaylee said. “We ain’t heard from him in a while, but we didn’t worry over-much ‘cause we usually didn’t ‘less he needed someone to post bail.”

“He’s going to need your help,” Ford said. “They all will.”

Mal, who had been thinking it over, gave a brisk, cold nod. “I follow you there, stranger,” he said. “Better shut the Perfectionists down before they get much further. Jayne, let him up.”

Jayne cut away the tape with what looked like a baby bayonet. “Say…” Ford wheedled. “Okay with you if I keep the towels?”

4.  
There was no Old Janx Spirit available on Serenity. Despite his extremely attractive explanation, Ford was unable to get anyone except Kaylee to play the old drinking game he had learned to play hanging around the madranite mines of Orion Beta.

Several bottles of Kaylee’s latest vintage of engine wine sat between them. They attempted to tip the bottle into pouring spirit into the glass of the opponent, who would have to drink it.

Ford thought that he was a shoo-in, because even though Janx Spirit depresses telepsychic power, this stuff wasn’t Janx Spirit and anyway he was ready to bet any number of obscenely biological forfeits that he was the only person on Serenity who *had* any telepsychic powers.

So he was truly surprised. Utterly gobsmacked. When River, who was in the laundry room hanging up the sheets, tipped bottle after bottle into Ford’s glass.

On the upside, River and Kaylee and Jayne and Wash thought it was absolutely hilarious that Ford had to walk around for three days with a pair of panties filched from Inara’s shuttle (drawers from the drawers, like sweets from the sweet) pulled over his head into an owl-like mask.

Inara was extremely not amused, especially since she had clients who would pay good money to do that, with or without Janx Spirit.

5\.   
“But why do you even care what happens to Miranda? Let ‘em drop dead, eat folks, what have you,” Jayne asked, pushing the heel of the loaf of bread in a spiral nebula through the last bit of gravy on his plate.

“Jayne, I’ve been assigned to cover Miranda for the HHG,” Ford said earnestly. “Do you know where I was before? Earth-that-Was for fifteen years! And Shadow! And Vulcan! I’ve had it! I can’t take any more of it!”

River nodded, popping a champagne grape that they took in trade for hauling some vats to the Hoogenstraaken Vintage Festival against the roof of her mouth. “It’s like you’re Jessica Fletcher, and you’ve been invited to the grand opening of, like, somebody’s cupcake shop.”

Nobody had a clue, but not like that was the first time anyway.

6\.   
Simon shook his head. “We can’t just fill the cartridges with water,” he said. “They’ll…they’ll have paperwork. They’ll probably insist on doing tests.”

“Piece of cake!” Ford said. “Can of corn! Just slit open one of the cases you’re…”

“We’re,” Simon said, on a steely note that made Jayne reassess his priority order for getting scared.

“…taking away, palm one of the cartridges, and hand it back to them.”

“They’ll have video feeds,” Simon said.

“Why’m I even listenin’ to you flap your gums? What the frag do you know about Alliance installations?” Jayne asked.

Simon smiled at him. Ford thought at first that Simon was coming apart at the seams, but that would be better, you can sew stuff back together right along the seam.

Jayne made a hasty exit to get a sweater, and then remembered he had to peel the little stringy part off the bean sprouts for supper and then clean out the grout in the shower tiles.

“Okay,” Ford said. “So there’ll have to be some kind of psychoactive ingredient in the cartridges. That shouldn’t be an insuperable obstacle. You’ve got stuff in your medical bag. You’ve got ampules and a hypo to fill them. You can tell them that it’s some kind of super-shiny new formula so they only need one a month for each reservoir.”

Simon pursed his lips, frowned, and then nodded. “That could work. I think.”

“I’m probably going to get my head bounced off the bulkhead for even asking…”

“Don’t worry, that’s my job around here,” Simon said.

“…but why are you walking point on this? I mean, Jayne sort of made sense, which probably means the Quadri-Millennium is coming.”

“Nobody here really likes the Alliance much—well, maybe Inara, and that’s commercial as much as political—but, but, you didn’t know River before. And what they did was take something amazing and just desecrate it. Burn it down. For no reason and for no advantage to themselves. I don’t want them to get away with that. Also, I’m pretty much in a supersaturated solution of trouble already, so if I do more stuff probably all that can happen is some of it falling out of solution.”

“Solution,” Ford said. “You could put some of that nebulashine Kaylee brews into some of them, even by my relaxed standards it scarcely qualifies as booze, they’d never suspect it was anything except a sinister substance designed to knock the indigenous population on their bums.”

7\.   
Inara and Ford sat side by side on the catwalk, looking down at the hoopball game. River did a double somersault with the ball tucked under her arm, sprang up, hung on to the hoop with one hand, and dunked the ball with the other.

“Is that even legal?” Jayne asked angrily.

“Everything OK?” Ford asked Inara.

“I got a partial transmission from an old friend of mine,” Inara said. “One that I haven’t seen for years. The transmission broke down before I could get much more than the sender and the location. The Heart of Gold.

“Oh, is that still around?” Ford said, falsely hearty. “Well, it’s, like forty-two flavors of hoopty, so don’t worry.” After all, it had been his relative who stole it in the first place, the least he could do was talk it up. He didn’t like to be snippy about any ride he thumbed, but he couldn’t help noticing that Serenity was pretty short on brain-wrenching devices, so there was nowhere to go but up.

Well, unless Marvin turned up. But Kaylee could probably winch up his diodes or something and turn him into something straight out of “The Sound of Music.”

On reflection, Ford was just as glad that never happened.

8.  
River stopped Ford in the corridor. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Surgeons can sew things together where there aren’t any seams. Even where there isn’t any *thing.*

“Yeah!” he said, “I’m sure you’re right!” and lowered his eyes and scampered away. He always felt guilty around River, because the last time he’d seen that kind of obscene tampering, that hideous destruction, inflicted on somebody’s brain, it had Zaphod’s initials all over it. Literally. He wanted to get out of River’s way before she did too much genealogy.

9\.   
Simon stopped Wash on the way back from the bridge after he’d put Serenity on Autopilot and was headed off to bed.

“Just drop us off and pick us up,” Simon said. “Tomorrow.”

“Umm, err, isn’t Mal still involved in planning this job?”

“We’ll—Ford and me inside, you driving the, ah, I believe the phrase is ‘get-away car,’--be back before anyone notices.”

“Naturally I understand why you don’t want Jayne anywhere near this, but what about our saturnine Captain and my lovely wife?”

“Trust me, they wouldn’t want to get involved in this one once they see me,” Simon said cryptically.

10\.   
“Landing on Miranda at your coordinates in three,” Wash said. He turned around from the shuttle’s control to see Simon, standing up a lot straighter than usual and with his hair slicked back. Oh, and wearing the dress uniform of a Captain in the Alliance Special Projects Executive, which Wash knew about because he collected all the coloring books and unit insignia stickers when he was a kid, and which explained Simon’s cryptic remark, unlike most of River’s that never got explained.

“Err,” Wash said, crossing himself, falling silent for a moment, then babbling nervously, “Does this mean that you’ve been, you know, under cover and now you’re going to, ummm, bind me by law and steal the shuttle?” He wanted to say “kill me” but couldn’t get it out even though that was what he really wanted to know.

He was trying to figure out which side Ford was on—if it was his, he could stand some assistance THIS VERY MINUTE, possibly in the form of clonking Simon over the head with a candlestick or something, although candlesticks weren’t standard issue in Firefly-class shuttles and appeared only if they happened to be smuggling some which, at that point in time, they weren’t. Although if Ford was on the other side, it would be more than OK with Wash if he were down at the boozer having a pint.

“Of course not,” Simon said, annoyed, because Wash was interfering with his warm-up to being Terrifying. “I’m still me.”

“But you’re an Alliance officer…”

“By that argument, you could prove that the portly industrialists who are Inara’s Special Friends are Catholic schoolgirls,” Simon said. Wash shivered again, this time experiencing a Visual. “Wash, it’s just a costume, OK?”

Ford, doing that don’t-notice-me thing that had kept him below the radar for centuries, sloped up, pushing a hand truck with two smallish and not very heavy cardboard cartons on it. “Wash, we’ll wave you when we’re done. It shouldn’t be more than…” (he checked his wristchron) “an hour and a half.”

Wash did not find it a very enjoyable wait, especially since Ford had done all of the sudoku except the really hard ones.

11.  
“Okay, Simon, what do we do now?” Ford asked, since they didn’t seem to be making any progress toward the door of the Ministry of Public Works. Simon checked the ‘chron again. (It was 15:18:09) “Right now, what we do is hide behind a tree,” Simon said. “I like that one, myself, but you can pick your own as long as you can see me when I signal.”

About ten minutes later, Simon took a deep breath, tapped Ford on the shoulder (Ford whispered, “Why NOW?” and Simon whispered, “Shift change!”) and goose-stepped toward the front door of the Ministry. He had given the matter some thought. There would be more guards to pass—and the accuracy of the papers that River had insisted on hand-illuminating would be subjected to more interrogation—at the front door. On the other hand, a *real* ASPE Captain wouldn’t go through the side door.

Simon crooked a finger, and Ford followed a few paces behind him. The hand truck went clunk-chunk-chunk up the marble stairs. The important people had, of course, already hit the golf course, and the not-important people desperately wanted to get out of the building before somebody stopped them and made them solve a problem and miss the last train home before it got impossibly crowded.

Simon and Ford soon made their way to a stockroom, where there were rather more than two cartons stenciled “TOP SECRET” on the bottom and “THIS WAY UP” on the top, so they were upside-down. The official “BEWARE OF LEOPARD” and workplace safety posters were properly affixed. There was a clerk, sitting at a metal desk, one hand clutching the hem of the overcoat hung on a coat tree behind her.

“Turn off the security camera,” Simon ordered. “This is a matter of the highest state security, and no one in this installation is cleared to the necessary level.”

The clerk nodded, dropped the hem, flicked the remote control to turn the screen first from the soap opera to the security channel, then to snow.

“Have. The. Pax. Vials. Been. Deployed?” Simon enunciated very quietly, a full stop between each word.

“Why, no, sir, there they are,” the clerk said.

“Why. Have. They. Not. Been Deployed?”

“It’s tomorrow, sir.”

“Security check,” he said, a little more normally. “You passed. Well, I’m here to take them away with me, those vials are defective. That formulation has been withdrawn and replaced by a more concentrated and effective one. Three vials are to be dispersed per prefecture. I’ll be back at 0800 hours tomorrow to see that it’s done properly.”

He stretched out his clipboard, made the clerk sign each of the triplicate copies of five documents, and made her call in the security guard, who *really* wanted to get home, to witness the signature.

Simon snapped his fingers. “Prisoner!” he said. “Load up those cartons.” Ford cringed, bowed, wrung his hands, and loaded the crates onto the hand truck. He had a livid bruise under one eye. The clerk and the security guard flinched in sympathy. (Ford had caught River’s elbow under the basket the previous afternoon.)

This time, they took the back way, with the ramp, because the hand truck was a lot heavier this time.

12  
“Well,” Ford said, after they’d loaded the cartons of The Pax into the shuttle, “I didn’t actually bring any luggage” (and he had two of Serenity’s towels tucked inside his shirt) “And I was supposed to get to Miranda, and I’m on Miranda. And, Simon, you’ve got a ride back. So I guess…tell everybody ‘Happy Trails’ for me. ‘Bye, Wash. You’re the coolest. You’re the Freon Cat and the Bisto Kid.”

“Don’t panic!” Wash told him.

13  
Simon spent a couple of hours in the medbay, swiveling on a stool between the molecular chromatograph and his encyclopedia, trying to figure out what to do with the paxilon hydrochlorate ampules. He didn’t think the stuff had any legitimate therapeutic uses, but maybe he could think of a way to reprocess it into something useful or at least harmless. He did consider, for a minute, using an intermediary to sell it to Niska, but he wouldn’t wish it on anyone. You couldn’t very well burn it.

Then he crawled into one of the hidey-holes and deep enough into the tunnels in the wall that he didn’t think anybody could hear him, screamed for five minutes solid, went back to the medbay, and drank more than he knew he should when he knew he was going to take a sleeping pill.

Nobody noticed that his voice was hoarse the next day, especially since he spoke only ten words, or rather five words twice (“Is there any coffee left?”), to which the answer was No, a.m., and Yes, p.m.

He was obviously hung over, but that happened often enough on Serenity to attract no comment whatsoever.

14.  
That fella gone?” Mal asked.

Zoe nodded.

“Simon take care of business?”

Zoe nodded.

“Damn!” Mal said. “Wouldna thought he had it in him.”

“Feed incepting in ten seconds, folks,” Wash’s voice came over the Comm.

“We could have cocktails,” Kaylee said. “’Cept that Simon made off with a whole run of brew, and the new one won’t be done aging ‘till Thursday.”

River (who was the one who hacked the Cortex feed) rotated the transmitter that Kaylee had built. When Wash strolled in from the bridge, they were all set to explain the first reel of “We Ate Her Report” to him, but he’d seen enough of these things not to need it.

“Reavers!” said the pretty blonde on the screen (or, rather, a patch of wall across from the dining room table). “If they catch us, they’ll rape us to death, eat us, sew our skins in their clothing, and **read poetry to us** …and if we’re very lucky, they’ll do it in that order.”

“Dunno why folks want to waste time on this foofaraw,” Mal said. “And as for my crew…Cappy’s gone! I don’t care how hoopy you think he is, Kaylee, playtime’s over! You all got work to do!”

River pushed the bowl of popcorn over when he sat down.

15.  
This is what the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the ‘Verse has to say about Miranda:

“Par-TAY!”


End file.
